Aaron Siskind's Canvas is Film

Many of the themes in photography come from expressing the world as we actually see it. But to the abstract expressionist, the world may be represented in emotion, feeling, and action. Aaron Siskind saw photography as another device in the abstract expressionist’s toolbox. He tended to use the film as a canvas and light as his brushes. He preached the flatness of the medium, striving to capture true emotion from the essence of the objects he photographed. A teacher at heart, Siskind taught English for twenty years. He then was a professor at the Chicago Institute of Design and finished his career at the Rhode Island School of Design. His images allow the viewer to enjoy the true meaning of balance, emphasis, line, and movement without the need for figurative forms. Siskind’s complexity from simplicity has influenced numerous artists and the expressionist’s movement would be vacant without his contributions.

It is All in the Seeing

The idea that those things around us are the most beautiful can only be fulfilled through a exhaustive search for design in the ways that we live. The ground goes down, the vertical lines stay perpendicular to the bench but the bench has legs of different sizes. Is this bench built correctly? If the bench was built correctly wouldn't you slide right off or is it so that if you have long legs you could sit on the left side of the bench and shorter people would sit on the right. However one looks at it, this image has a beauty that keeps the viewer interested. The value and contrasts allow for the detail to show through. How can any wall have that much to look at yet nothing is there. Photograph by Charles Pawlik

The Format of Penn

When Irving Penn said "Photographing a cake can be art." did he mean simplicity is beauty? Looking at his work we can see how he used simple compositions to create interest within the frame. He loved the edges of the format. The negative spaces were planned precisely to bring our our eyes back to the important areas of the image. The negative spaces are interesting without upstaging the main subject. This is balance and emphasis in action.

Rob Forbes and his Silent Hand of Design

The idea of simplicity in design is evident when we look at the TED talk by Rob Forbes on ways of seeing Video on TED.com Mr. Forbes has a unique way of seeing the extrodinary in the ordinary. These are things we walk past everyday and never notice. He has taken snapshots of these designs in the street not as works of art but more as reminders to himself of how juxtipositions can create design. At one point he talks about how the scaffolding surrounding a building has more design spirit than possible the building itself. He touches on the influence of culture in design and how that can reflect a countries attitudes. How much do we walk by every day and not see?

Simplicity, beauty, Composition

When simplicity is the key to the art, composition becomes even more important. Meriol Lehmann has brought this to light. His images of plants are complex through their simplicity. How can one find beauty in the smallest of objects? How is it that we walk by these masterpieces everyday without a blink. Mr. Lehmann's images are proof that we all need to open our eyes and our mind to the beauty that surrounds us everyday.

Check out Meriol Lehmann at http://www.photographyserved.com/Gallery/NATURE/610703

Welcome to the new School Year

Welcome everyone to the new 2010-2011 school year. This year should be very special with the new art room giving us so much space, a new art club being organized, and a new year to give us new inspiration. The theme today is technology and how it is influencing the art world. Let’s start with those crazy apps that you can download to your iphone. Here is a short list of some of the apps that can keep most artists entertained for hours.

Brushes
Brushes is a painting application designed from scratch for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Featuring an advanced color picker, several realistic brushes, multiple layers, extreme zooming, and a simple yet deep interface, it is a powerful tool for creating original artwork on your mobile device. You can check out a brushes gallery in flicker here.

TypeDrawing
TypeDrawing is a really simple and easy app to use, but it is perfect for creating TYPOGRAPHY ART and UNIQUE WATERMARK over your photos.

FlipBook Lite
Easily make your doodles come to life and share them with your friends. FlipBook has everything you need to get started animating, from an eraser to onion skinning (which lets you see a faint image of the previous and next frames) to layered drawing.

For Blackberry

Digitalarti
Digital art free app with international digital artworks, artists, festivals and innovation news, pictures, videos and more. .Discover the latest digital artists worldwide. Check the spotlight on the Artist of the Month.

Make a Mess
Remember the simple joys of finger painting? Get ready to relive them! The Make A Mess application for your BlackBerry® lets you easily create your own finger painting masterpiece right on your BlackBerry screen, then share it with friends or upload to an online gallery.

Jeff Scher Has A Dream

The video short has become more and more popular with all of the internet possibilities like YouTube. More artists are using this medium in new and creative ways to describe their world view. The artist Jeff Scher has been producing a blog for The New York Times called "The Animated Life" His latest video is The Shadow's Dream. A wonderful look at our upside-down world. Just by turning the camera upside-down our whole world has been transformed and we become the second thought while our shadows take center stage.

Astronauts Artists

The ability to see beauty and art in everyday life is a reoccurring theme in my life. My platinum/palladium images beautify normality. I am far from the only artist with this theme however some may or may not realize thay are doing the same thing. Our astronauts who travel in the shuttle have been photographing the earth and Nasa catalogues all the images. While many of the thousands of images are straight foward, many are aesthetically interesting. You can find these images at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6226

The constant evolution of sculpture has brought us to Tara Donovan. She builds incredible sculptures, landscapes, and environments allowing us to see the world differently through common, everyday objects. Ms. Donovan is a current MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner and her first major retrospective will open on October 10 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

While sculpture has a sense of form, there are new technologies that play with the idea of three-dimensionality and give two dimensional subjects a three-dimensional look. Microsoft Live Labs has created “Photosynth”. Photosynth processes the user’s photographs of an object or place from many different angles and then creates a sort of wrap around three sixty view of the object, room, or place. While this type of technology has been around for many years, (panoramic photography and stitch digital photography) photosynth takes it to a new level and allows users with inexpensive digital cameras to create photo montages with unlimited numbers of different views. Check out the classroom synth. In the creative hand, this tool can create the next wave of virtual sculpture.

August 20, 2008

While creating, recreating or redesigning art as you like is an ability in some art realms, the exact opposite is happening to photographers who document the “wrong” thing. Censorship is the opposite of artistic creation. A recent New York Times article “4000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images’ by Michael Kamber and Tim Arango cover some of the problems photographers have had publishing their work on the Iraq war. The images of Zoriah Miller are captivating, thought-provoking, and extremely well-crafted but when the body of a dead marine is central to the image, questions of respect for the dead and sensitivity for family members are raised. Miller questions the amount of information getting out to the public. “The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing — which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working,”

Censorship is not new to art but what is amazing is its constantly changing face.
China has restrictive internet access not only for its population but also for the international media now covering the Olympics. In a podcast, (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0808/S00067.htm) Paul Deady interviews Margaret Taylor on www.scoop.co about these restrictions. While the people of China are accustomed to these limitations, the foreign press is outraged.

But where does censorship stop? Even my own art class has its “limitations”. Students may not offend others though their art. It is not the creation that is limited but the display may be. What is needed is more tolerance by all.

My friend Jason Willaford would never explain his encaustic paintings to me. He insisted that it was about my relationship to the painting , not just his. The shape of art is changing everyday as artists engage in new ideas and technology in order to express themselves and sometimes allow the viewer to not only experience it for themselves but to actually change the art to suit their own viewpoint. I haven’t talked to Jason in a while but I bet he loves this stuff.

Radiohead has released their video for their song “House of Cards” This video uses 3d imaging (Velodyne Lidar system and Geometric Informatics scanning) to scan landscapes, interiors, and portraits. The ghostly images shake and shimmer across the screen. Radiohead is once more pushing the envelope and one wonders when the portrait will never need a model. They take it one step further by providing the code so one can design our own Radiohead video. You customize the relationship with the art.

Jonathan Harris in 2007 documented a whale hunt with the Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska. These whale hunts have been going on for a thousand years in this village. International law allows them to take 22 whales a year. Harris and large format photographer Andrew Moore spent nine days on this journey. Harris shot 3,214 images with his digital Canon EOS. The photographs were taken at a minimum of every five minutes and when the action was fierce he shot more creating what he calls a “photographic heartbeat”. His website, thewhalehunt.com , gives the viewer many choices regarding the expositions composition. Using different constraints, the viewer can key on different aspects of the hunt like the cast, or concepts such as blood, tools, or whales and wildlife, or contexts like Barrow Alaska, the whaling camp, and/or the Artic Ocean. As Harris writes, “Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.” This storytelling experiment becomes a reflection of our own interests.

No longer is art something we observe and accept or deny, but now it can become one in which we deny, change, then accept